


Living Life In Empty Graves

by aurilly



Category: Alias, Lost
Genre: Crossover, Crossover Pairings, F/M, Gen, Roommates, Time Loop, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-11
Updated: 2011-12-11
Packaged: 2017-10-27 05:35:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/292164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An alternate explanation for The Missing Years, in which there turns out to be a bigger reason why the number 47 is such a recurring theme in Sydney's life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Living Life In Empty Graves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [perdiccas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/perdiccas/gifts).



> Set within the season 2 finale of Alias. Spoilers for all of Lost.
> 
> Written because Sydney deserves a slightly less depressing life.

Sydney woke, lunging for breath in heavy, ugly gasps, which didn't make sense a minute later, when the rest of her senses kicked in and she realized there was nothing at all wrong with her: she wasn't drowning, she wasn't being hurt, she was barely even injured. The reminders of the drag-out, knock-down fight she’d just had were still there. She could feel bruises all over her body, and a couple of cracked ribs, but they felt like days-old bruises, days-old broken bones—wounds that had already been treated, not wounds that had been inflicted only moments ago.

She opened her eyes and looked around her. Instead of her bedroom floor, where she remembered landing before passing out, she was on a hospital bed in a room stuffed with equipment. She tried to rub her eyes, but her arms were restrained. Looking down, she saw handcuffs pinning her to the bed.

 _Wonderful service here_ , Sydney thought. If she had a nickel for every time she’d woken up tied down to something…

She groaned and fell back against the pillows. When it wasn’t one thing, it was another. She wondered why she hadn’t quit when she’d had the chance, why she’d let Kendall pressure her into staying so many months ago. Now Francie was dead, Will was dead, Emily was dead, Diane was dead… and here she was, yet again, captured by some party or another. She could almost smell the impending torture scene.

Sydney was so tired of this shit.

The door opened and a man walked in. He was an older man—balding, beady eyes—almost a caricature of a rich bad guy. Sark had once quipped that they all frequented the same tailor; this was definitely another customer. He looked vaguely familiar, but Sydney was too groggy to place him.

“You’re awake.” His tone was superficially friendly, but Sydney knew better. This man’s smile was creepier than most people’s murderous glares.

“Where am I?”

“You are in a facility I own off the coast of Fiji. My men relieved you from Sloane’s custody.”

“Sloane?” She should have known. It was always Sloane. Sloane or Sark. Or her mother. Or if she was _really_ lucky, all three.

“His people picked you up from your apartment while you were still unconscious, almost dead. My people intercepted their van. That was two weeks ago. But you’re here now, and almost completely healed. My doctors have been working around the clock. You’re welcome, by the way.”

He smiled again, and now that her eyes were focusing better, Sydney finally was able to put the name with the face. She’d seen his photograph in a dossier, heard the name from her father and from Devlin.

“Widmore. You’re Charles Widmore. You’re Alliance. SD-10.”

“I _was_ Alliance. I hear I have you to thank for ending that increasingly cumbersome relationship.”

A flood of information rushed back to Sydney. Charles Widmore was one of the nastier pieces of work in the Alliance, and that was saying a lot. He’d come from nowhere, had no history, but had somehow amassed an enormous fortune out of nothing. Sydney had worked with his underlings once, nice guys who’d thought they were part of MI-6. This Widmore played his people just as ruthlessly as Sloane had played his.

“What do you want with me, you son of a bitch?”

“As soon as you’re well enough, I’m sending you on an assignment. A rather tricky one.”

“Is this more Rambaldi bullshit? Because I’ll tell you right now, I’m not interested.”

Sydney’s father had once mentioned Widmore having an obsession similar to Sloane’s in intensity and weirdness, though whether it was Rambaldi or something slightly different, he had never found out. The SD-10 agents she’d met had spoken of bizarre missions, similar to her own, in which they’d been sent to locate mysterious artifacts and missing vessels all over the world.

“Rambaldi is Sloane’s obsession, not mine. Rambaldi was just someone who visited where I’m sending you, and came back with knowledge he should never have learned… But I get ahead of myself. I’ve studied your career closely, Sydney Bristow. And I know you are the only person for this mission.”

“Who says I have any intention of working for you?”

Widmore turned around and switched on the television that was mounted on the wall. Sydney watched as a cemetery filled with people. Vaughn was there, her father, Dixon, Marshall, Kendall… This was her funeral.

“As far as the world knows, you’re already dead. Which means no one will be looking for you when you go missing again,” Widmore said as they watched the silent recording. “You’ll work for me because it’s your best alternative. If you prefer, I could restore you to Sloane’s partners. What they had in mind for you was not very savory.”

Sydney’s eyes filled with tears as she watched her friends mourn her. It was over.

She’d always wanted to be free of it all, of that whole life. Now, in the most gruesome twist, she finally was.

“My father won’t believe it,” she said. “He’ll keep looking for me.”

“He won’t find you. No one will. Not where I’m sending you.” Brusquely getting down to business, Widmore began briefing her, whether she wanted to hear it or not. “My men will fly you over the Pacific, following a certain bearing. As soon as you near the coordinates they’ve been instructed to find, you’ll parachute out. You’re to use your own name—no need for an alias—but you will need a cover story. I want you to locate a notebook.”

“A notebook? What?” This definitely sounded like the usual Rambaldi crap.

Instead of answering, he just kept going, as though this all made perfect sense. “When you find it, you’ll deliver it to me.”

“This isn’t much to go on. What if I fail?”

“You won’t.” He didn’t say it the way Sloane used to, where the words ‘you’d better not’ were implied. Doubt didn’t seem to form part of Widmore’s mental make-up.

“How do I get back?” Sydney asked as he started walking to the door. Widmore turned around and looked at her one last time.

“As far as I know,” he replied, “you don’t.”

“Then how am I supposed to complete the mission?” she yelled, struggling against her bonds.

But he was gone.

***

 

  


**32 YEARS EARLIER**  


 

***

Miles and Juliet were sitting on the beach near the dock, watching the submarine sail away and down, out of sight. Juliet passed the bottle of rum she'd just taken a swig out of over to Miles, who looked at it for a minute, then at her, and then gulped down more than could conveniently fit in his mouth. Juliet laughed when some dribbled down his chin and onto his jumpsuit.

"The mosquitoes are going to love you all the way home."

"They already do," Miles said, casting around him for something to dry himself with. “I’ve been trying to break up with them for months, but they keep crawling back.”

Horace, who'd come to officially see the passengers off, and had invited himself to hang out before heading back to camp, handed Miles a handkerchief.

"Pass me the rum?"

Miles shook his head, annoyed, and passed the bottle. This guy was unbelievable, not to mention a cockblocker. All he’d wanted was to say goodbye to his last remaining pre-island friend in peace, and spend a little quality time with his new favorite drinking buddy. Instead, he was spending the afternoon shielding Juliet from Horace the Drunken Leader’s disgusting advances, instead of getting to make his own.

"Do you know how many times I've sat on this beach drinking this shitty Dharma rum?" Juliet said, with a mischievous wink.

"Not as many times as I have," Horace said, staring absent-mindedly at the water.

"Hmmm," Juliet didn’t quite agree.

Miles had only known her for a couple of months, but weeks were like years in this place, and by now, he’d figured out her sense of humor well enough to know it was probably more times than she was allowed to say in front of Horace. He turned and nodded at her to signal that he got the joke.

“How many years have you spent on the island, Horace?” Juliet asked, after she and Miles had finished their private eye laughter.

“Five. I came on the very first pilgrimage. Me and Pierre.”

Miles winced. He’d never seen his dad before coming to live in Dharmaville, but logic and timing suggested that the dude shacking up with his mom had to be the guy. Thankfully, Juliet didn’t seem to notice his involuntary reaction. She was too busy drinking, only half-listening to Horace ramble.

“I remember getting off the sub, seeing this place for the first time. It was love at first sight. Paradise. Can’t imagine anyone wanting to leave. And yet people do.” He pointed in the direction of the long-gone submarine.

Juliet glanced at Miles and grinned, the wide, toothy one that made his stomach ache sometimes. “I think it depends on the company.”

He knew she’d slowly been warming up to the place ever since they got to the 70s, but Miles didn’t realize she’d come so far. And that’s when he realized he was in the same boat, too. He hadn’t been too hot on the island for his first few days of residence, what with people shoving grenades in his mouth and having to carry a screaming baby for two days, but, as he sat looking at Juliet, and taking a swig of rum, Miles decided life wasn’t so bad, all things considered.

“You two haven’t been here long. Soon, you’ll understand how wonderful it truly is here,” Horace said, with the self-confidence of a guy at the top of the food chain who’d never been sober enough to look down and see the cult for the trees.

Overhead, Miles heard an unfamiliar noise. They all looked up just in time to see a burst of flame erupt in the middle of the endless blue sky. Something, much smaller than an aircraft or even a piece of one, and strapped to a small parachute, plummeted into the water, a couple of hundred feet away from shore.

Juliet was the first to her feet, shielding her eyes from the sun as she peered out into the ocean. “I think that was a person.”

The three of them looked at one another. Or rather, Juliet and Horace looked at Miles. Expectantly.

“Seriously?” he asked. But when neither of them moved, he sucked it up, kicked off his shoes, and dove in.

Thankfully, the waves were relatively calm. The swim out was easy; dragging back an unconscious human weight in a full-on masked bodysuit was the hard part. The tide went over both of their heads a few times. By the time he got close enough to the shore for Juliet and Horace to help him drag the body up the sand, Miles was half-drowned for his trouble.

While he sank to the ground and hacked salt-water out of his lungs, Juliet ripped the mask off the body, prepping for full doctor mode.

“It’s a girl!” Horace said, with a drunken whistle.

As soon as he’d caught his breath enough to look for himself, Miles understood Horace’s reaction. A ridiculously hot chick of about his own age lay passed out on the sand beside him.

Juliet knelt over the body and began performing CPR. After a few tense minutes, the stranger shook, arched up, and then vomited at least a cupful of water.

“Hey, hey, we’ve got you,” Juliet said, in her best soothing therapist voice.

The woman sat up and looked around her. “What happened? Where are the others? Oh god, are they in the water?” She made a motion like she was going to dive in herself, but Juliet restrained her.

“What others?”

“The two men flying the plane. Did you rescue them, too?”

She was all business, this one.

“You’re the only one who made it out. We were watching. I’m so sorry,” Juliet said. “Are you okay? Does it hurt anywhere?”

“Yeah yeah, I’m fine,” the woman said shortly, still glancing frantically around her.

“What happened?” Miles asked.

Distractedly, she answered, “I don’t know. We were…” She took another deep breath, closed her eyes, and began again, this time more coherently. “We were on a topographical mission, surveying some island chains in this region, when the engine started squealing. I got on my parachute. They told me it was time to jump. So I did, and then overhead I heard the plane exploding. A piece of metal hit me. I guess knocked me out. I thought maybe they’d jumped, too…”

Miles looked at Juliet and noticed a tensing of her left eyelid that would have been imperceptible to anyone else. He knew her well enough to see that she suspected some larger story than this bird was telling. Hell, it wasn’t too far off from the story they’d been telling for months.

“I’m sorry about the rest of your group. I’m glad we were able to get you safely to shore, at least.” Horace put a ‘comforting’ hand on the woman’s shoulder, and squeezed it a little too long. She rolled her eyes, like she’d been there, done that, was bored to death of it, and might punch Horace in the nuts if he didn’t stop.

“So who are you?” she asked as she shrugged him off. Under her breath, so softly that Miles was the only one to hear, she added, “…other than Uncle Inappropriate.”

Miles decided right then and there that he liked her. Forget what he’d just said about the island being only “not so bad”. This was a place where hot chicks literally fell from the sky on a semi-regular basis. This place was great.

“My name is Horace Goodspeed. This here is Miles, and Juliet. We’re part of the Dharma Initiative,” Horace said proudly, as though anyone gave a shit.

“The what?” the girl asked. _Exactly,_ Miles thought.

“It’s a long story,” Juliet said. “Horace, she should come with us, shouldn’t she?”

Horace scratched his chin and looked out to sea, at nothing at all. “Sub’s gone. There’s no other way of getting her home again. Not for at least another six months. And we can’t leave her out here to get found by the Hostiles.”

“Hostiles?”

Miles stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels. “Yeah. Another long story. So what’s your name?”

She hesitated, just a millisecond too long, as though she wasn’t sure what to answer. “Sydney. Sydney Bristow.”

“We should probably head back to the barracks,” Juliet said as she packed up their boozy picnic. “The medics will want to check you out for internal injuries, just to be sure.”

Once Sydney had stood up and he’d had a chance to look at her more thoroughly, Miles noticed something that confirmed his and Juliet’s suspicions. Hanging back with her as the other two bickered about which path to take, he slunk up beside her ear.

“Nice Kevlar you’ve got there,” he whispered.

Sydney looked at him quizzically, in a way that gave Miles the distinct feeling she could probably eat about five guys like him for breakfast. “Thanks?”

He made sure Horace was out of earshot before continuing, “I’m guessing you’re not from around now, are you?”

She started to respond, then registered his word choice, and stopped herself. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she whispered back.

“I came to this island the same way you did. Parachuted out of a helicopter. Wearing what looks like _exactly_ the same body armour you’ve got on. Thing is, the psychos who gave it to me kept bragging about how it was so brand-new, state-of-the-art, blah blah blah.”

“So?”

“So, I know for a fact this outfit you’re wearing won’t exist for another 30 years.”

Sydney looked at him like he was crazy, and that’s when it hit him: he’d already become part of the scenery. He remembered the days, only a few months ago, when _he’d_ been the one giving people the side-eye. This place… it did things to you. Made you okay with insanity.

“It’s 1974,” he explained. “Welcome to the time warp.”

***

Sydney had spent the last few hours in a daze. She was used to crazy developments. After years of Sloane and Rambaldi, crazy was practically in her job description. But travelling 30 years into the past was on a whole other level. She’d scoffed at Miles during their walk through the woods, but then she arrived at the camp-village thing they lived in, with its residents wandering around in bellbottoms and flower-power peasant blouses, with the laughably old yet brand-new technology all around her—not to mention Horace’s unironically-delivered anachronisms—and well, there was no denying it. The clincher were the magazines displayed in Horace’s office; they were all dated 1974, but the pages were crisp and white and new, not yellowed as they should have been.

Miles had whispered to her to keep quiet about the whole time-travel thing, which wasn’t hard; it’s easy not to talk about things you don’t understand. He’d given Juliet some sort of non-verbal download, and she’d immediately taken Sydney’s half-baked story about topographical research and run with it. The two of them successfully wheedled Horace to get her set up in the camp. When Sydney had tried to protest, Juliet hushed her with silent imperiousness.

From the way they talked, Sydney quickly guessed that Horace and the jumpsuit brigade had no idea that Miles, and apparently Juliet, too, weren’t from around now either.

Obviously, Widmore’s plan had gone spectacularly awry. There was nothing to do but accept her new circumstances, just as she’d done her whole life. Life as a spy had taught her when to fight and when to see where developments led. Her new friends seemed okay so far, and she could always figure something else out if things went sour.

Now they were in the living room of a small yellow house that looked half moved into—Miles’s house, apparently, even though they all looked the same both outside and inside. Juliet had told her to sit down and relax on a new-ish sofa that reminded her of her old Aunt Frances’s. Miles had gone to get some other people, he’d said. And then they’d talk.

Sydney ran her fingers along the rim of the water glass Juliet had just given her. It had an old, long-discontinued pattern she remembered from her childhood, back when her grandmother gave her a glass of milk every night. Only it was brand new where it should have been scratched and cracked and weathered from years of use. Sure, she’d wandered around the camp, looking at everything... But only now, as her finger trailed in circles, eliciting that haunting chime sound, was she fully accepting it.

She looked up and saw Juliet watching her, an impenetrable smile on her pale lips as she followed Sydney’s unspoken train of thought. “It’s the little things, isn’t it? My parents had these glasses, too.”

“This is crazy. How is this happening?”

“This island isn’t like other places.”

“You don’t say?”

Before she could continue, a blond guy entered the house along with Miles and another Asian man. The blond one took one look at her, whistled, and put down the box he was carrying. In two steps, he was up in Sydney’s grill.

“Did it hurt?” he asked.

“Did what hurt?”

“When you fell from heaven.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Juliet refilled Sydney’s water glass. “Just ignore him.”

“Couldn’t help myself. It was too good to pass up. Miles here just filled me in.” The jerk stuck out a hand. “Name’s James Ford. And that’s Jin Kwon. He doesn’t really speak English.”

Jin waved shyly. “Welcome,” he said, hesitantly and with a strong accent that Sydney recognized.

“It’s nice to meet you,” she replied in Korean. Jin’s face lit up like Christmas morning, and he rattled off an ecstatic stream of excitement and questions about where she’d learned the language. Sydney explained, in kind, that she’d studied it ‘for work’.

James watched them go back and forth and said, “You speak Korean? God, it’s like we’re importing them.”

Finally deigning to respond to him, she introduced herself. “I’m Sydney. And if you ever try to feed me a cheesy pick-up line again, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

“Nice to meet you, too, angel.”

Miles flopped into one of the armchairs. “Hey, Jim, grab me a beer, will you?”

“Grab it yourself, Hoss.”

But Sydney noticed he got two out of the fridge anyway and tossed one to Miles before slumping down next to her. James was blond and handsome and cocky and obnoxious, but Sydney could already tell his bark was worse than his bite; he reminded her of a less prissy, less dangerous version of Sark. She could tell they would either get along great, or she’d end up punching him in the face. Probably both.

“So, tell us about this topographical mission of yours,” Miles said, in a tone that made it clear he—and they—already knew it was bogus.

“It isn’t that interesting,” she deflected, wanting to feel them out a bit before saying anything. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re the only ones who find it strange that we’re in 1974?”

“It’s too long for one sitting. How about we fill you in over the long winter evenings by the fireside?” James said.

Sydney had no intention for sticking around that long. “Or how about we get out of here before winter sets in?”

James shook his head. “We could have left on the sub, but it’s 1974 out there in the real world, too. What’s the point? No, staying here’s our best bet. Easy livin’, all the Dharma beer you can drink…”

“Don’t you want to get back to our own time?”

“We can’t. We don’t know how it works,” Juliet said. She was curled up on the couch, eating a burned muffin and looking serene as a cat, even while explaining the most ridiculous story. Sydney already felt a sort of kinship with her. “We were flashing from time period to time period, and getting sick from all the transitions. It didn’t matter when we ended up; we just wanted it to stop before we lost any more people. We finally ended up here. Now. For good.” Then, seeing Sydney’s horrified expression, she added kindly, “I’m sure you hadn’t planned on this happening to you. For what it’s worth, neither did we.”

Widmore hadn’t been joking. This was a one-way mission. The rest of them seemed to have accepted their fate, had no intention of leaving, and were expecting her to settle into the same complacency. They had the look of a rag-tag group who had nothing else to go back to, and hence, didn’t mind their new situation. Everything in her being fought the idea that she could end up like them, but a nagging insistence in the back of her brain told her she wasn’t much different. As far as the world knew, she was already dead. And now she hadn’t even been born yet.

“What year was it, you know, yesterday?” Miles asked.

“2006.”

Slowly, James asked, “Did you ever hear about a plane crash? Oceanic 815?”

It was the last question she expected anyone to ask her.

“Did you know someone on that flight?” Juliet asked, after seeing Sydney’s involuntary facial expressions.

After talking to them for a few minutes, her gut now felt reassured that these were nice, normal people, not a threat. “Yes. Sort of. I work in Intelligence,” she began.

“Awesome,” Miles cooed.

“Maybe a year and a half ago, my dad was working this Australian terrorism case. Everything went fine. But then our civilian asset insisted staying an extra day. My dad rebooked the ticket himself. It was the right thing to do, but that’s how he ended up on Oceanic 815.”

“What was the guy’s name?” James slowly choked out.

“Sayid Jarrah.”

“Ol’ Mohammed was working with US Intelligence? The hell?” James looked ashamed about something.

“My partner… boyfriend… and I were so spooked, like it was our fault, like the CIA should have forced him to go the day before instead of staying for his friend’s funeral. Which is why we were so relieved he was one of the Oceanic Six.”

“The what?” they all asked.

“Yeah, you know, The Oceanic Six, the six survivors who came back.” Only after she said it did she realize that, according to what she’d heard so far, there was no way for them to know. So, she filled them in on a year-old news story that to them could only be a few months old. The time discordance was already giving her a headache.

“What about Frank Lapidus?” Miles asked when she was done.

“Or John Locke?” James followed up.

“Or Desmond Hume?” Juliet was the only one not freaking out.

“Never heard of them. Why are you so interested in this?”

“Juliet came here three years before, and I came three months after, but these two were in that crash.” Miles pointed at James and Jin. “This was the _real_ island they landed on.”

Sydney didn’t understand. “All those people were here in the Dharma Initiative?”

“No, it was 2004 then. We lived on the beach,” James said. “Those of us who didn’t make it off started time-traveling maybe ten minutes after your ‘Oceanic Six’ escaped, like them leaving made the island go gonzo.”

Miles scowled. “It sounds like they’re all pretending none of us exist. Which means no one’s ever going to come looking for us.”

“I’m sure they have a good reason,” Juliet said. “They would have come back for us if they could have. I’d guess they’re scared of something. Or someone.”

Miles looked hard at Sydney. “Someone like Charles Widmore.”

Almost as a reflex, Sydney opened her eyes wide in perfectly feigned confusion. “Who?”

James leaned forward. “You’ve got a good poker face, angel, but it’s no better than Juliet’s here. You know exactly who the man’s talking about. Look, there’s only the five of us now, against a whole world of 70s, so let’s cut the crap.”

There was no use denying it. They already knew, and he was right; Sydney could tell these were the only allies she was likely to get.

“How did you know?” she asked Miles.

“Because he sent me here, too. The Kevlar, remember?” He shrugged, and it almost killed Sydney to see this nice-seeming guy so well-trained in the fine art of resignation. “Turned out to be a one-way ticket. Just like yours. And now he’s made everyone think we’re dead.”

“Sounds familiar,” Sydney said. She gave them the short version—CIA, presumed dead, Widmore, now here. They gave her the short version of theirs—crash, Others, freighter, time travel. There wasn’t much she could tell them that would help their predicament; she was just as in the dark as they were.

After a while, the focus drifted away from her and they began talking amongst themselves, chit-chatting and speculating.

“You look like you could use some fresh air,” Juliet whispered while Miles, James and Jin reminisced about some girl and her baby and that woman who was currently (well, in 2006) on trial for murder. Loudly, she added, “I’m going to show Sydney around. We’ll be back soon.”

They left the guys in the living room, gossiping like a bunch of girls.

“Thanks for that,” Sydney said as they went down the porch steps. “I needed to decompress.”

“I thought so. I know it’s a lot to take in.” She paused. “I know you don’t want to be here, but it’s nice to have another woman around. They can be exhausting.”

“I can tell,” Sydney laughed, and the corners of Juliet’s eyes crinkled sweetly. “So, let’s do the tour.”

As they walked, Juliet waved at a yellow house, identical to all the others. “This is the house I used to live in. It’s in a lot better condition now, as you can probably guess. And there’s the psycho who tricked me into coming here and then kept me against my will for three years.”

“Huh?” Sydney asked when Juliet pointed to a sad-looking twelve-year-old sitting on a porch.

“He grows up to be a lot less cute,” she explained, before continuing on. “And that little girl over there is Charlotte. We mentioned her earlier. She was born here; I guess she ends up leaving at some point. She came back on the same freighter as Miles.”

Sydney watched as a young mother played with an adorable two-year-old on a swing set. It was hard to believe this little girl was effectively gone. Sydney clenched her fists. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—accept something like that.

“Why don’t you try to do something about it? Something to save her?”

“We did. Daniel told her never to come back. It didn’t help. She didn’t listen. She comes anyway.”

They passed by Dr. Chang, who had checked Sydney in an hour or so before, and a woman Sydney assumed to be his wife.

“Hello, Juliet,” the woman said sweetly.

“Evening, Mrs. Chang.”

As soon as they were out of earshot, Juliet whispered, “And those are Miles’s parents.”

“What?!”

“They haven’t had him yet, but it has to be within the next couple of years. Don’t let on that you know, though. Miles thinks it’s some big secret he’s keeping from the rest of us, but it’s hard to miss the resemblance, not to mention the way he goes fish-faced whenever they walk into a room.”

Juliet pointed out the cafeteria, the infirmary, the motor pool, and other buildings of interest in the little village, all with the same subtly ironic tourist-guide intonation. When they got back around to Juliet’s house, Sydney exploded.

“How do you bear it? Knowing nothing you do matters? Being trapped here like this?”

“It’s better now than it was in 2004. Back then, we were all forced to stay, and the harder we tried to escape, the more obstacles were thrown at us; this time, we chose it, and, I think, we’re all doing a bit better. No one makes us do anything we don’t want to do.” Juliet paused. “Something tells me you could use a break from people forcing you into doing things you don’t believe in.”

Sydney thought about it, and then nodded her answer.

By the end of the day, the arrangements were all set. With each passing of the submarine, life shifted a little in Dharmaville; Sydney’s arrival was barely a blip in the natural order of the camp. With someone named Daniel gone, Miles was down a roommate, so James was in the process of moving in with him rather than both of them living with strangers. Jin was a lucky bastard who’d had a house all to himself all along. Juliet’s roommate had just left with Daniel for Michigan, so Sydney was to move in with her.

Not that she had anything to move—she no longer even had the clothes on her back. Miles made sure the body armor was safely hidden away, before any of the Dharma crowd got a close look at it and start getting ideas. Sydney was given a few of Juliet’s cast-offs, warm cotton tees and soft slacks that did more to make her feel at ease than anything else so far.

It was easy enough for her to go along with everything, pretending she had been born in the 1940s. She’d been playing roles for as long as she could remember, but she wasn’t used to having so many other people play along with her. Sydney actually liked the company.

Once she told them about her background in the CIA, they (well, James anyway) tried to recruit her into the Security division. But Sydney balked. If this was to be a free, fresh start, she wanted it to _actually_ be free.

“What else do you want to do?” Miles asked her. “I mean, what else are you good at?”

“I have a Masters in English literature. My plan was always to quit Intelligence and become a teacher. It just kept not working out.”

“There’s an opening in the school,” James said. “We could ask Horace about that.”

Juliet squeezed Sydney’s hand. “I used to be a doctor. Now I’m a mechanic. It’s great.”

And that’s how Sydney ended up as a teacher at the Middle School, as a card-carrying member of the Dharma Initiative, and as the kind of person who wore a jumpsuit every single day.

She slept ten hours a night every night for the first six weeks; years of jet-lag had finally caught up with her, and for the first time in ten years, she finally had a chance to rest. As the months went by, and she found more and more to do with herself (gardening, exploring, fixing equipment in the communications station, teaching Jin English, watching _MASH_ late at night in the security building when Miles was on duty) and got to know her fellow secret time-travelers better, Sydney realized Juliet was right; it wasn’t so bad here. The Dharma Initiative was a little too cultish for her tastes, and the food was bland, but at least their little bubble was peaceful.

Juliet turned out to be a perfect roommate, the kind with whom Sydney could curl up on the couch every night, cooking dinner, eating ice cream and dancing embarrassingly in her pajamas (the tunes were older, but the spirit was the same). They swapped books and stories and had more heartbreak in common than she could possibly have expected. Buttoned up, flat-ironed, and stoic on the outside, Juliet turned out to be a girlier-girl than Sydney first realized—than the others still realized. Late at night, when it was just the two of them, she got glimpses of the woman Juliet had been before she was brought here—a woman who was eerily similar to the person Sydney had been before Danny’s death.

No one could replace what she’d lost, not ever, but Sydney was starting to rebuild her life.

***

“This is _amazing_ ,” Sydney cooed, her pigtails hanging low on her back as she craned her neck up.

“There’s a lot less of it than the last time we saw it,” Miles noted. “I wonder what happened.”

Juliet, as usual, had the answers. “Richard said there was a tidal wave.”

Sydney turned around to look at her. “Really? That’s so boring. In a place like this, you’d think it would have been something really out there. Right, Miles?”

Miles found himself tongue-tied. He was sort of distracted by the way Sydney’s nose was wrinkled in cute disdain and by the way the sun glinted off Juliet’s hair. “Uh, yeah. Definitely,” he finally choked out.

Luckily, it was a good enough answer for Sydney, who went back to admiring the improbable statue. Of a foot. So he went back to admiring _them_.

Miles had a problem. Well, he had a lot of problems, but even before Twilight Zone Island, chief among them had been his ‘falling in love with people who think of him as only a friend’ problem.

Now, it wasn’t completely a bad thing. At least they still wanted to spend time with him. And Miles had learned over the years that being in the company of hot women attracts the attention of _other_ hot women, who start wondering what is so interesting about that young man to make beautiful ladies flock to him.

Well, at least until this goddamn island. These days, the problem with hot women who only wanted to be friends was that there were no _other_ hot women around to find this intriguing. Sure, some of the Dharma chicks were cute, but they were… still hung up on The Beatles breaking up or still thought Sean Connery was the dreamiest… stuff Miles was like 40 years over already.

“What’s next?” Sydney asked.

“This is zone five,” Juliet said, checking the map. Sydney came around to look at it with her. “Let’s walk around the beach, and then we can cut back to the van at this spot and head home.”

 _Thank god,_ Miles thought. It was almost over.

Some might think going on a camping trip with gorgeous women in a gorgeous jungle on a gorgeous weekend would be the definition of ‘the life’. In most cases this would be true. However, bouncing up and down in the back seat of a VW van was the last way Miles had wanted to spend his Saturday, and clomping around with 40 pounds of gear on his back was the last way he’d wanted to spend his Sunday. Yet here he was. Juliet and Sydney were running what was clearly an efficient operation, even if Miles had no idea what was going on.

It all started a couple of months before, when Sydney had found out about the group’s ongoing mission to look for the rest of their crew. The gleam in her eyes only intensified the more she found out about what they’d been doing. The more she started to plan, the more excited she became. It was as though all those spidey-spy senses that were lying dormant were finally getting flexed.

“No no, you’re going about this all wrong,” she’d told Jim, who had previously been in charge.

“This is my operation, Moneypenny, not yours,” he’d balked. Attitudes flared, and for a few minutes, things had gotten heated. But as soon as Sydney had started talking about grids and perimeters and signals and god only knows what, Jim had backed down. He had his faults, lots of them, but he was slowly starting to learn when he’d been outclassed. Juliet and Sydney were to thank for that; they outclassed him on a regular basis.

Anyway, the end result was that Miles had been recruited for the latest trip. Jim and Jin were on duty in the security station, ready to make sure no one got footage of them taking a van out past the security fence and parking it a few miles away before continuing on foot, then camping overnight. Most of the Dharma folks were over on the other island conducting experiments, so the coast was probably clear.

Sydney had dived wholeheartedly into this despite never having met the missing people. Of all of them, she seemed to be having the hardest time accepting the whole ‘whatever happened, happened’ theory of time travel that Dan had beaten into them. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t believe it; it was more that she didn’t know how else to act. She always needed to be doing something, even if the theory proved itself right time after time, and her efforts at whatever kept failing. She had no compunction about sweet-talking that asshole Radzinsky in order to gain access to the communications equipment, which she used to try signaling the CIA and the KGB. Miles had no idea what she was doing, but it was complicated, encoded, and ultimately pointless. The signals never went through, and even when they did, she got hostile responses saying to stop bothering them. Whatever Sydney was trying to stop was still going to happen.

So, she’d taken to this—to locating their missing friends. She needed somewhere to direct her zeal. She’d rounded up what she said were all the necessary supplies for their little trip: in addition to the standard camping gear, they also had binoculars, magazines, guns, and sweets. She said she wanted to see more of the island than the Dharma Initiative usually allowed. She wanted to get a gander at the statue. The future crash site. The temple. She had a whole lot of plans, all of which made Miles extremely nervous. But so far, at least, it had worked out okay. Only one monster sighting, and no sign of the Others.

“We should brush away our tracks as we leave,” Sydney said.

“Why?” Miles asked.

“So The Others won’t know we’ve come,” Juliet explained. “You’ve never done this kind of thing before, have you?”

“You say it like you’re asking if I’ve ever been to Disneyland, which I haven’t, by the way. How do _you_ know about this stuff?”

“It was a chapter in Others 101,” she said. But then more seriously, she added, “And even before that, it’s how I got proof my husband was having an affair.”

They were quiet for the next mile.

They all tried to play it hunky-dory most of the time—there was an unspoken understanding they had too much shared tragedy to wax on about their personal pre-island tragedies—but every so often, everyone’s individual drama slipped out. Something about Jin’s prostitute mother trying to blackmail him, something about James’s parents killing themselves for money, something about Juliet’s husband stealing her research… Not to mention the dramas of all the people who’d either left or died. Everyone seemed to be living in a fucking soap opera, except for Miles, who had been stuck in a whacked-out sci-fi drama his whole life.

Funny thing though: Sydney may have missed out on all the pre/post-70s island funtimes, but her past blew all of theirs, and even all of the people who were now gone, out of the water. It was _insane_. Not-dead mothers who shot their own children in cold blood, some natural-born-killer type who kept alternately trying to kill her and get in her pants, immortal clock-makers, magically levitating red balls of water that gave you Ebola or some shit. If it had been anyone else, Miles would have sworn she was making it all up.

As expected, they found nothing, no one, not even a hint of Claire or Rose or Bernard or anyone, but it wasn’t all a loss. Miles had still spent a weekend of just him and the ladies—a night sandwiched between them under the stars. At one point, Juliet had called them ‘The Three Musketeers’. Sure, his back and feet hurt, but he kind of lived for these moments, much as he pretended to complain.

A few hours later, they were back at the van, just finished with lunch, and were loading things back into the trunk when Juliet suddenly stopped and put her finger to her lips. “ _Others_ ,” she mouthed.

That’s when Miles heard the rustle of feet, too. The three of them looked at one another, paralyzed. Crap.

“I’ve got this,” Sydney whispered, and that confident, almost scarily competent, gleam returned to her eyes. “Just hide in the van and stay down.”

“You sure?” Juliet mouthed again. Sydney nodded.

Miles wasn’t the hero type, and he figured if a trained spy said she could handle it, she could probably handle it, so he crouched as directed. Juliet hesitated, but then got in and pulled a blanket over them.

“Oh. Mah. _Gawd_ , what a relief! You two are _such_ a _godsend_ ,” he heard Sydney say in a sugary sweet, ditzy voice, and only Juliet’s immediate hand over his mouth stopped Miles from cracking up right there, because this unexpected Southern belle accent was hilarious. And amazing.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” a gruff voice said.

Even though he couldn’t see her, Miles knew Sydney’s dimples were working overtime as she replied, “Well, you see, my van here broke down and I’ve been trying to fix it, and little ol’ me was getting absolutely _nowhere_. It’s so lucky you two came along. Is everybody already heading back from the other island?”

“We are not Dharma people,” a different, but equally unfriendly, voice said. “You should not be here. Your presence breaks the truce.”

“Wait, you mean you’re not Dharma Initiative people? Oh golly me.” (Even Juliet had to smile at that one; damn, Sydney was _good_.) “You see, I’m all new here, haven’t met everybody yet. I just assumed…”

Other #1 started saying something unintelligible to Other #2, and Miles could hear a scuffle begin. Juliet immediately jumped up and out of the van. Miles was right behind her, but as soon as he saw what was going on, he knew his services would not be needed.

Sydney was going to town on these Others’ asses. Intellectually, Miles had always known she was some sort of trained operative, but he’d never actually thought about what that meant: that she was some sort of action hero. Two pretty big Others were trying to bring her down, but it was a kick to the groin here and an elbow to the neck there. Miles almost didn’t recognize Sydney as the girl-next-door he’d been spending every day of the past nine months with. Juliet got in there, too, and in less than a minute, the two Others were on their knees, with their hands behind their heads. Juliet and Sydney stood in front of them, guns pointed. It was like something out of _Kill Bill_.

He couldn’t tell if he was terrified or turned on.

Other #1 said something unintelligible again to Other #2. But Juliet interrupted him in the same language. Miles guessed this was Latin; he’d heard all about her encounter with the Others back in the 1950s. Other #2 stared wide-eyed at Juliet like he was seeing a ghost, and Miles didn’t need to know Latin to understand that Other #1 was asking his friend what was wrong. Sydney piped up to say something in Latin, too.

Just before Miles was about to ask someone to tell him the hell what was going on, Juliet said to Other #2 in English, “Nice to see you again too, Charles.”

Sydney glanced over at Juliet. “You know this guy?”

“He tried to cut my hand off 20 years ago. He’s aged, but this is definitely Charles Widmore.”

“Charles Widmore?” Sydney was so shocked that she actually tripped just a tiny bit backwards. Other #1 tried to take advantage of the momentary lapse in security to stand up, but Juliet whacked him in the face with the butt of her shotgun before he had barely moved. He crumpled to the ground in pain, mumbling what were obviously obscenities in Latin.

“I assume from your reaction that, as with this woman, you and I meet again in the future,” Widmore said to Sydney, rather nastily.

Instead of responding, Sydney simply re-trained her gun at his head.

“If we don’t return to our camp by nightfall, Richard will know exactly what happened,” the other Other said. “You’ve broken the truce by attacking us.”

“You attacked first,” Sydney said, still looking spooked, but quickly collecting herself.

Widmore ignored her. “It doesn’t matter. Either you kill us, and he figures it out, or we get back and tell him, and it’ll be our word against yours on who attacked whom. Either way, there will be war.”

“You won’t tell Richard anything,” Juliet said coolly, and with such confidence that even Sydney looked over at her in surprise.

“How do you know?” Miles asked, trying to feel like more than just a spectator here.

“Because this section of the island is off-limits to your people,” she said, smugly addressing Widmore. “Always has been and always will be. You won’t tell Richard, because you’re not supposed to be here any more than we are.”

Other #1 looked at Widmore, and Miles could tell they knew when they’d been beaten.

Sydney moved to search the two men, and Miles followed her cue and helped her while Juliet kept the gun pointed. Together, they stripped the guys of their weapons. Miles was left holding a couple of knives and a pistol.

“You two are going to get up, walk towards the beach, and keep going,” Sydney said. “We’re going to get in our van and drive home. Is that understood?”

Reluctantly, the Others nodded and did as she asked. Miles stored their weapons in the front seat of the van and watched the two men disappear into the foliage. Once the coast was clear, he and the girls finished packing up.

“I was useless,” he groused. “Jim’s never gonna let me live this down.”

Sydney grinned; the super spy was gone and Miles’s friend with pigtails was back, just like that. “You were great. We’ll tell him you beat one of them up.”

God, she was the best.

“Oh, wait a minute,” Miles said, a few minutes after they’d started driving. “I dropped something.” There was no room in the trail to turn the van around, so he offered to hop out and run back. It was a five-minute jog back to where they started, and then off the trail a bit, to where they’d eaten lunch. He knew exactly where he had been sitting; he’d tumbled his pockets out at one point and he knew that’s when he must have dropped it. He checked everywhere, but the place was clean. He noticed large, fresh boot tracks that had to belong to Widmore and his friend.

When he got back to where Syd and Juliet were waiting for him, he hopped back in the van and huffed, “It’s not there. Those Others must have picked it up after we left.”

“Aw, I’m sorry about that,” Sydney said.

“Oh well. It was only a notebook. I’ll just start a new one.”

Juliet wagged a finger at him. “Miles, do you keep a diary?” she asked teasingly.

“No. Because I’m not a twelve-year-old girl.”

While he spoke, Sydney’s back suddenly went arrow-straight, like she’d just remembered something. “A notebook?” she asked, turning around to face him and looking panicked. She gripped his knee so tightly it hurt. “What was in it? Miles, this might be important.”

“Just stuff I want to remember in case we ever decide to leave the island and try to make it in the real world. So when I’m going through the 80s and 90s again, I can catch some of the things I missed the first time. Like, to make sure I go see _Die Hard_ in the theaters, or watch the Hoff dance on the Berlin Wall in 1989, or the years when my team wins the World Series. Stuff… like…” Miles’s voice slowed as the full implication of what had happened hit home for all of them. “Shit.”

The ladies were gracious enough not to glare at him. Instead, Juliet pensively nuzzled her cheek into her shoulder, and Sydney stared at a nonspecific point out the window. He could feel the repressed horror around him.

“Widmore told me this mission was about delivering a notebook for him,” Sydney said. “I never understood until now. I always thought something went wrong, that he thought I’d be in 2006 when I got to the island…”

“I guess now we know how he made all his money,” Juliet said, and started the car again.

“Sorry guys,” Miles mumbled, feeling like the lowest form of pond scum. “My bad.”

Juliet changed the subject, and when they got home, Sydney gave him a quick squeeze around the waist before disappearing into Estrogen Central, as Jim liked to call it.

“Don’t worry about it,” Sydney whispered. “No one blames you.”

“We’ll see you at dinner, right?” Juliet asked, with the usual twinkle in her eye, and he knew everything was okay.

Miles exhaled the air he’d been holding the entire ride home.

***

Sydney was making herself some lunch when Miles let himself in, as usual.

“Hey, you and Juliet wanna head over to beach?”

Sydney opened her mouth to reply when a loud moan coming from the direction of Juliet’s bedroom answered for her.

Miles’s face fell and Sydney’s heart broke for him.

“Oh,” he said mechanically, then turned on his heels and walked right out again.

Sydney put down her spoon and went after him. She found him sitting on the back porch of the Lewis’s house with his head in his hands. It was their usual spot. The Lewis’s spent most of their time on the small island, and theirs was the only house whose porch looked away from the village, towards the jungle. Sydney sat beside him.

“I’m so sorry. I thought you knew.”

“He’s my goddamn roommate, and all this time I thought he was still hung up on that Kate chick.” He peeked through the crook of his elbow at her. “How long? How long have I been an idiot for?”

Sydney hated having to tell him. “A couple of months?”

Miles zipped down his jumpsuit, stuck his head in it, and zipped it back up again. Sydney heard a despairing groan emanating from inside the khaki, and hugged him tighter.

“She’s happy, though.”

Sydney heard him sigh. “Well, that’s something, at least.”

“It’ll be okay. You’ll get over it. Trust me.”

“How do you know that? You don’t know that,” the disembodied voice said.

“Because I’ve been that girl.”

Sydney didn’t hold it against him when he snapped, “Isn’t that nice for you?”

“It wasn’t nice. It was awkward as hell. But you know, he found someone else.”

“Oh yeah? Who?”

“My roommate.”

There was an awkward pause as they both followed the metaphor out to the logical conclusion. Even without being able to see him, Sydney could feel a bubble of tension growing around them. It wasn’t at all what she had meant, but she wasn’t about to knock him down even further by protesting.

Miles unzipped his jumpsuit again. His face was suspicious, not hopeful. Wearily, he asked, “Would this be the roommate who was killed and replaced by an evil clone?”

Yikes. Sydney hadn’t followed the metaphor _quite_ that far. “Yeah, that’s the one.”

“In that case, I’d rather not get over it, if it’s okay by you. My life is complicated enough. The last thing I need on top of everything else is some evil shape-shifter going around impersonating dead people. And plus, if you were replaced, who would kick Jim’s ass at Risk for me?”

Sydney laughed, and the tension dissipated.

It always did when he was around.

“Wait here,” she said, standing up. “I’ll get my stuff and then we’ll go to the beach, just the two of us, okay?”

“Yeah. That sounds good.”

With the next submarine departure and the usual shake-up in island life that accompanied it, things got a little more official a few weeks later. They were over at Jin’s house for dinner when Juliet and James announced they were moving into newly vacated couple’s housing. Miles took it in stride, acknowledging the news with a funny, snarky, heart-felt toast. He seemed genuinely happy to know they were happy, and it hadn’t affected his friendship with James at all, thank goodness; they were still Sydney’s very own version of Starsky and Hutch. Sydney knew he’d just started sleeping with one of the newer Dharma recruits, but that didn’t mean anything. He _seemed_ over it, but then again, he kept himself even more bottled up than Juliet.

When they left the dinner party, Sydney impulsively took Miles’s hand in hers as they walked through the Dharma courtyard. She’d been there over a year already and she now knew every blade of grass in the place. Did she miss her life, her dad, Dixon, Vaughn? Sure. Did she miss the frustrations of her life? Well… not really. Juliet had been right on that first day. About everything.

She liked being a teacher. She liked helping kids (even though the rest of them had given up on little Ben Linus, Sydney hadn’t). She liked her new friends. She liked the island. It was her life now, and only here, where there was a new concept of the word ‘now’, did she understand how little she’d been living her old one.

“When Juliet and James move in together, you should move in with me,” she said. The words came out before she’d thought about it too much, but once they were hanging there, she realized she meant it.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m over at your guys’s house all the time anyway. Can’t see how it would be that different. Okay,” he said and shrugged, trying to downplay how excited he was. “You’re not going to make me braid your hair or anything, are you?”

“Not unless you want to.”

The only guy Sydney had ever lived with before was Danny, which felt like lifetimes ago. Sharing a house with Miles couldn’t have been more different. Unlike Danny, he was a slob (though he tried really hard, for her sake). He was _not_ a morning person, and thought Sydney’s mandatory daybreak jogs were a manifestation of some psychosis she should get checked out by professionals. He was a surprisingly habitual creature, preferring to slouch in the same posture in the same chair every night than to mix it up. He put her to bed whenever she dozed off on the couch, told that disgusting Radzinsky she wasn’t home even when she totally was, and made her laugh on those rare occasions when the fact that _oh my god we are living in 1975_ hit her hard and got her down.

(And it turned out he didn’t mind braiding hair, in the end. He just made her promise never to tell James.)

But the biggest difference between living with Danny (and even Francie or Juliet) and living with Miles turned out to be how little time they actually spent _inside_ the house. Sydney and Juliet had held court most of the time, inviting their friends over and making things cozy. Miles preferred being outside—strumming on the guitar on the Lewis’s back porch while Sydney sang along to songs that hadn’t been written yet (Miles considered himself too cool to sing), swimming at the beach, and laying on the roof of their house, side by side, looking at the stars.

They did a lot of the last one. It turned out Jin was naturally a quiet guy; now that Sydney had improved his English skills, they’d realized it had been a personality trait, not a language issue. And with James and Juliet spending just that much more time by themselves, Miles and Sydney spent that much more time on the roof.

“We should go to the party Saturday night,” Sydney said as they lay there one night, months after they’d settled into their new routine. The days were melding into one now. She could hardly believe it had already been almost two years.

“Are you talking about the hootenanny?” Miles could not have registered more scorn if he tried.

“Yeah, it’ll be fun.”

“If you consider a death sentence fun, then sure, yeah, it’ll be a great time.”

“Oh, come on.”

He went with her in the end; he always did. He wall-flowered in the corner, chatting with Jin while she mingled. Things got a bit wild as the evening wore on (these Dharma people could _party_ ), and they ran out of wine. Horace asked Sydney to head down to the storeroom to get some more. She walked outside, head spinning a little from too much to drink, and through the empty village.

Someone was waiting for her at the storeroom entrance. Just standing there calmly like he belonged there and had been waiting for her forever.

He didn’t look like a person. A normal person, at any rate. His eyes were as blue as the sea, and his hair and skin as sandy gold as the beach. There was an ethereal quality about him, something deeply ancient and not quite human. Even though she had no idea who he was, there was only one thing he could be.

“You’re Jacob, aren’t you?”

“You’ve heard of me.”

“Juliet doesn’t think you exist. I have to say, even if you did, I thought you’d be taller.”

He laughed, and his face changed aspect into something more familiar, something she recognized from long ago. Sydney couldn’t believe it. Of all the…

She punched him in the face and yelled at him while he reeled.

“You. You were the guy who handed me the slip of paper that sent me to SD-6. You administered my entrance exam. You ruined my life.”

“It brought you here, though.” He didn’t even have the decency to apologize.

“I didn’t need to be brought here. I was doing just fine.”

“Were you?”

She stopped to think. She refused to answer him.

“Do you like it here?” he asked, taking her silence to mean what he wanted it to, what was probably true.

“It’s fine.”

“If you really like it, it could be yours, if you want.” There was a terrifying sense of permanence about his offer that creeped her out.

“What, you’re _giving_ me the island?”

“It comes with certain… responsibilities. Responsibilities I know you could handle. Please?” There was a terribly sad desperation in his voice. Sydney, for all her anger, couldn’t help but pity him.

“I’m sorry, but no. Not me,” she babbled, not even sure what the question was, but knowing with certainty that she didn’t want to say yes. The loneliness was coming off him in waves. She didn’t want to be like that, to be like that forever.

His face fell. He was like an overgrown little boy, for all his godly demeanor. “I had to ask. You would have done a good job, but I can’t force you. I can send you home.”

This was unexpected. “All of us?”

Jacob shook his head. “I can only provide passage for one.”

“Then you should send Juliet. She deserves it more than me. Or send Jin back to his wife and child.”

“It’s you or no one.” It was phrased as a choice, but Sydney had the distinct feeling it was actually an order. She’d refused his offer and now he was kicking her out.

“As island gods go, you suck.”

He didn’t disagree. “You’ll have to promise never to let anyone find out about the island. You’ll have to pretend none of this ever happened. Pretend you don’t remember anything about the time you’ve spent away. You’ll have to promise me.”

“I promise. I still think it’s ridiculous you can only let one of us go, though.”

“I don’t make the rules,” he said.

“Then who does?”

He told her how to leave, but he never answered the question.

“It’ll be there whenever you’re ready. But it should be soon,” he said before walking into the dark shadow of the storeroom and disappearing into the night.

The ensuing silence was broken by Horace’s voice shouting across the courtyard. “Sydney! Where are you? Where’s the wine?”

“Coming!” she said, and quickly went to fetch the bottles.

***

Miles couldn’t put his finger on it, but Syd had been acting weird for the past two weeks. Getting randomly emotional, giving everyone hugs every five minutes, telling them how much she loved them. He found it uncomfortably mushy and wished she would stop.

“Are you dying?” he blurted out one evening while he washed the dishes.

She looked up from her book. “What?”

“Just trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with you.”

She sighed and went back to reading. Miles rolled his eyes in frustration.

Eventually, it all came out in the most dramatic way possible. With them, was there any other option?

Miles was in the middle of a cracked-out yet awesome dream involving him and Sydney being hired as band managers for Coldplay and getting a chance to tell Chris Martin exactly how much he sucked, when he found himself awake, with someone in his bed, stroking his face.

From great dream to greater reality… Miles could keep living like this.

He cracked one eye open and saw Sydney curled up beside him, tears running down her cheeks.

“You’re giving me some really mixed signals right now,” he said slowly, cautiously; meanwhile, his head was exploding.

“I have to go,” she said.

“… to the bathroom?” he asked, even though deep down—even though it didn’t make any sense—he understood what she meant.

Sydney shook her head. She knew he knew.

“Right now?” he asked.

“Phil’s on security duty. I drugged his water bottle earlier this evening. He’s out cold. No one will see us leave the perimeter.”

Miles had to hand it to her; she hadn’t lost her touch.

“Where are we going?” he asked, once he’d put on his shoes, and together, they’d crept silently out of the house and away from the sleeping village.

“There’s a cave,” Sydney replied.

“Oh, I know what you’re talking about. But the Orchid is in the opposite direction. And anyway, that exit’s out of commission. The well’s long gone and they haven’t broken ground on the station yet.”

“We aren’t going to the Orchid well. This is a different one.”

“Who told you about it?”

Sydney thought about it, and then said, “The island.”

Miles rolled his eyes. “Not this again.”

But it turned out she was right, just as Locke had been right. After walking for a couple of hours, they reached a tree-covered cave entrance Miles had never seen before. Once inside, they followed it far and deep into the earth.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Miles said, as they reached the end and saw an ancient-looking ladder leading even further down. Sydney pointed her flashlight into the hole.

“It isn’t far. I can see the bottom,” she said, and began her descent.

Below, it was freezing cold, a steep contrast to the tropical temperatures above. Miles wished he’d known to bring a jacket. Once they reached the bottom, he hugged himself to keep warm. He couldn’t believe this was happening. He couldn’t believe she was leaving. People were _always_ fucking leaving him.

Sydney shone her flashlight around the cave. There were Egyptian hieroglyphics everywhere, and a giant donkey wheel attached to the wall. _Obviously._ But after over two years on the island, Miles couldn’t even be surprised. Sure. Magic donkey wheels. Why not?

“So what now, Indy?” he asked.

“I’m supposed to turn it. And then somehow I’ll go home.” Sydney didn’t sound too sure.

“That’s it?”

“I wanted it to be Juliet. Or Jin. But it’s only supposed to be me. I’m being kicked out. I’m so sorry.” She burst into tears. “I’m going to do everything I can to save you guys. I promise.”

“Hey, hey, don’t cry,” he said, and hugged her. His heart was breaking, too, but he wasn’t going to let on. She was taking this hard enough as it was. “This doesn’t have to be goodbye forever. The plan’s always been to leave the island before the 1992 massacre, and try to make it out in the real world. I’ll look you up when it’s 2000-something again. I’ll probably be around 60, though. A lot more grey hair.”

“You’ll still look good.” She laughed through her tears and hugged him tight. “It’s been nice, here. With all of you. Being normal.”

“Thanks, but in case you’ve forgotten, this is not normal. It’s 1976, and we’re on Cryptic Bullshit Island.”

“I know. But I’m going to miss it.” She paused. “I’ll miss you.”

Miles knew she probably meant the collective you—him, Jim, Jin, Juliet—but her face suggested something else, too.

“The roof will be lonely without you,” he said, instead of what he really meant, which was that _he_ would be lonely.

“I wish you could come with me.”

Miles shuffled, unable to look her in the eye. “I gotta… they sort of need me here, you know? Someone has to look after this crew.” He paused as she started crying again (goddammit), and, trying to get her to stop, he babbled, “And hey, my mom’s pregnant. I gotta stick around for that, right? It’s not every day you get to meet your own mini-me.”

She saw right through his forced cheerfulness. “You’re really brave, you know that?”

“Shut up.”

“I mean it, Miles.”

“No really. Shut the fuck up and go,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t take it the wrong way. He didn’t mean to be harsh, but he couldn’t take much more of this.

Without knowing what he was doing, almost as a reflex, he kissed her, right on the lips. To his surprise, she kissed him back, practically shoving him against the wall, and tangling her fingers desperately in his hair. Between the two of them, there was a whole lotta lip action going on. The part of his brain that was still working wondered where this was coming from and why he hadn’t thought of it before. When they finally came up for air, Sydney stared at him, in wide-eyed shock, and touched her fingers to her lips, like she was suddenly realizing the same thing.

He really had the worst timing.

“Okay, I guess this is it.” She lined herself up between two of the wheel spokes and started pushing. Nothing happened at first, but slowly, the familiar buzzing noise of impending time travel became audible and grew louder and louder, and the familiar light of impending time travel emanated from somewhere and grew brighter and brighter, until Miles couldn’t see anything but white, couldn’t hear anything but buzzing. And then slowly, just as it had come, the light dimmed and the noise ebbed until the only sound was Miles’s breathing, and the only light came from the flashlight he held.

Sydney was gone.

Miles took one last look at the wheel, kicked a rock on the ground, and then climbed back up the ladder, back through the cave, and out into the dark jungle.

It was going to be a long, lonely walk home.

***

__  
**Epilogue**  


Sydney exchanged pleasantries with Mme. Lestraux and walked out of the boulangerie with her evening’s baguette. Her apartment was only a few blocks away.

She’d been living in this French village for three months. The wheel had spat her out in a dark alley in Taipei, exactly two years after she’d left—exactly the same amount of time she’d spent on the island. She’d done what Jacob had asked. She’d called the CIA, pretended she had amnesia. She’d been trained to resist hypnosis; matter how much they tested her, they didn’t get any information out of her.

The only person she told was her father. She had to. He didn’t understand half of what she said, but he believed her. And he saw that she was a mess.

What made her even more of a mess was finding out that Ajira Flight 316 had going missing the day before her return; the Oceanic Six had been on board. News coverage of the tragedy was quickly superseded by the worldwide earthquake that happened about a week later, but at least it proved they hadn’t given up on their friends, despite previous appearances to the contrary.

It was more than she could say for the people she was returning to here. Her father had been the only one to hold out hope, to realize her life was too crazy to accept a half-baked death story like the one Widmore had set up. Everyone else had given up on her.

She’d tried to get back into the swing of things, but after two years on the island, after the ensuing awkwardness with Vaughn, after ten years of spy crap, after being told, yet again, that her job was to take orders from Sloane, she’d quit the CIA after only a week back on the job. She’d had a taste of what following her own orders had been like, and she couldn’t go back.

So her father had helped her fake her death again (she was becoming a pro at this) and had arranged a new life for her. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t the worst. She taught English as a second language during the days, and researched anything she could get her hands on about the island during the evenings. Her father was doing his part, too, over in LA. So far, they hadn’t gotten anywhere, but she’d never give up.

She had just gotten home and changed out of her work clothes when the doorbell rang.

It had never rung before.

She pulled her gun out from where it was hidden at the bottom of the fruit basket, and called through the door, “Qui c’est?”

“My name’s, uh, Jerry Farnsworth. I’m looking for Sophie Deschalais?” a familiar voice called.

Sydney threw the door open to reveal Miles standing there with a piece of paper in his hand. In her haste to grab him, she accidentally poked him in the ribs with the gun.

“Woah, woah woah,” he said, backing up. “Is that any way to say hi to an old friend?”

She put the gun down and hugged him properly.

“You aren’t sixty!” she exclaimed, somewhat stupidly, but her brain wasn’t really working right then.

He laughed. “No. It’s only been about a year since you left. Nine months then, two now.”

Sydney led him to the couch and kept holding his hand, as though if she let go, he’d disappear again.

“Where’s everybody else?”

Multiple answers flickered across his face, some in his eyes, others wrinkling the line of his mouth, still more clenching his jaw. She understood before he’d figured out where to begin.

“Who?” she asked, clasping her hand over her mouth, not sure which answers would be better or worse. They’d all been her friends.

“Jin. Jin’s wife. Sayid. Some other really solid people you’ll never get to meet.” A pause. “Juliet.”

“Oh honey.” Sydney reached out and wrapped her arms around his head, pulling him bodily to nestle against her. It wasn’t physically comfortable, probably not for either of them, but she hoped he needed it as much as she did.

“She went out like a champ, though,” he said through gritted teeth, words muffled by the wool of her sweater, trying to pretend that heroism made it all better. “They all did.”

“Of course they did. How’s James taking it?”

“So hard there isn’t space left over for anyone else to take it.”

Sydney knew him well enough to tell this was the most heartfelt admission of feeling he was capable of making. Anything more and the veneer of cool he always clung to so fiercely might disappear.

Abruptly, he twisted in her arms to face her. “You know the evil shape-shifting clone bullshit? Like with your friend?”

“Yeah?”

He shook his head and closed his eyes, reliving horrible memories. “So much worse.”

He’d always been sarcastic, but he’d never been this bad. He and Juliet had always been the ones holding it together for everyone else, always been the level heads in the group. Things must have gotten really bad after Sydney had left. She hated herself for it, and resolved to make everything better, now that they were back.

They lay like that for a few minutes, with her holding him while he buried himself in her sweater, letting it out in his own way.

When he was ready, he asked, “So, your name is Sophie now?”

“It came with the passport.”

“So did mine. I’m actually the only one who out of all of us who hasn’t been officially presumed dead yet—my seven years of being missing aren’t up yet—but I didn’t want to be left out.”

“You know, my dad’s not going to be happy to know someone got through all the false trails and dead ends he set up around me.”

He sat up and winked at her. “How do you think we found you?”

“What?”

“Well, the first thing Jim and I did as soon as and the dust settled was to look you up, but we read that you’d died. _Again._ And we were, like, ‘Bullshit. Not our Syd.’ We figured if anyone knew where you were, it would be your dad, right? It took us weeks to find out where he lives. I rang his doorbell the other day and…”

Sydney already had a bad feeling about this. “Oh my god…”

“Oh yeah. He didn't believe I was who I said I was. Thought I was a terrorist or something. He threatened me with all sorts of stuff. He’s the scariest person I’ve ever met. And you know coming from me, that’s saying a lot.”

“He’s just paranoid. You'd be, too, if you had his life.”

“Right. Anyway, after that, Jim thought he’d have a go.”

“Please tell me he didn’t.”

“It went about as well as you’re imagining. He’s scheduled to get the cast off in a few weeks.”

Sydney felt terrible for laughing, but she shouldn’t help it. It had been so long since she’d laughed at all. She was already feeling better and better, and Miles was looking it, too.

“So then Richard volunteered to talk to him,” Miles continued.

“Richard _Alpert_?!” Sydney had never even seen him, but he’d always been spoken of as an enemy.

“Yeah, he’s one of us now. We had him pegged all wrong. Turns out he’s a pretty cool guy. You’ll like him.”

It was nice to know that, despite everything, they were still picking up strays. She had a feeling they always would.

“Anyway, we didn’t think he’d do any better,” Miles said, “but next thing we knew, he was back, and your dad had given him this address. Go figure. So, I hopped on a plane and here I am. Where’s Lover Boy?”

For two years, traveling through time and space, she’d held strong. Vaughn hadn’t. It had taken some time, but Sydney had slowly learned to accept it. She’d just reached a point where she could talk about it without bitterness. “He got married. He married someone else while I was away.” She watched Miles perform herculean efforts to keep a straight face. “You don’t have to pretend to be sad,” she added.

“Good. ‘Cause I’m not. I bet she’s a bitch.”

Sydney laughed. Leave it to him to make her feel better, even about this. “How’d you know?”

“I always know.” But he interrupted his indifference to look concerned about her. “So, you’ve been all by yourself all this time?”

Sydney scooted closer to him on the couch. “Yeah, but not anymore.”

“No. Not anymore.”

They smiled at one another for a minute. The room felt a lot smaller. Then Sydney jumped to her feet. “You wanna go to the roof? There’s a great view of the village from there.”

“Definitely.”


End file.
